"Police three weeks ago launched an
investigation into alleged sexual abuse by a teacher at Jerusalem's Mercaz
Harav yeshiva 14 years ago ... In mid-December, police were alerted to
accusations by three men - now in their late 20s - who studied at the yeshiva in
their teenage years and said they were sexually molested by the man. Police then
began investigations into other men who reportedly were also sexually abused,
but did not come forward ... The head of the yeshiva, former Ashkenazi chief
rabbi Avraham Shapira, was alerted to the complaints several months ago
in an anonymous letter and soon after in an anonymous phone call ... Senior
National Religious Party figures, meanwhile, reacted to reports that Shapira
attempted to silence those who made the allegations of sexual misconduct ...
This is not the first time that Shapira has been suspected of trying to prevent
a police inquiry into the improprieties of yeshiva teachers. Last year, he
received a warning letter from Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein after
he was said to have tried to cover up the illegal sexual behavior of Ze'ev
Kopolevitch, formerly head of Jerusalem's Netiv Meir Yeshiva, who was
sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison."

"A former employee of Calgary Jewish Community Council has been
charged with possession of child pornography, sexual assault and sexual
interference with a child under 14 years of age. David Webber, 35, was
arrested on February 22. On that date, police executed a search warrant on his
apartment. In the search, they seized a large number of Polaroid photographs of
nude boys aged 10 to 14 and written materials. Several children have already
been interviewed and are alleged to be victims of sexual assault ... Before
moving to Calgary, Webber was youth director of the Beth Israel Synagogue in
Edmonton. In 1990, he was charged with sexual assault in Edmonton, but the
charges were subsequently dismissed."

"A garbage truck driver with a part-time job as a synagogue
sexton in a town in the center of the country was convicted yesterday by a
Jerusalem District Court for sexually assaulting children who went to synagogue
to pray with him ... At least three children were involved, with one, the
13-year-old, being the son of another synagogue official. That boy was so
disturbed by the sexual abuse that he took up drugs, and the sexton then
exploited that knowledge to blackmail the youth into more sexual intercourse.
The other two children were subject to his fondling, often on the back porch of
the synagogue during prayers, in exchange for sweets."

"A rabbi accused of molesting three boys at a Chabad elementary
school was arrested Dec. 3 and remained at the L.A. Men’s Central Jail in lieu
of $500,000 bail as The Journal went to press. Rabbi Mordechai Yomtov’s
arrest on 10 felony counts of committing lewd acts with children came following
an investigation by the LAPD after three boys, ages 8 to 10, reported last month
that Yomtov was keeping each of them alone in the classroom and molesting them
while the other children were at recess. Yomtov, 36, an Australian-born rabbi
with a wife and four children, pleaded not guilty. A preliminary hearing in Los
Angeles Superior Court is set for Dec. 17. Yomtov has taught 8- to 10-year-olds
for six years at Cheder Menachem, a school with 220 boys, kindergarten through
eighth grade, on Melrose Avenue in the Beverly Boulevard-La Brea Avenue
neighborhood. The school issued a written statement following the arrest: 'Due
to the sensitivity of the issues involved and to protect the privacy of our
students, parents, teachers and staff, the school will be making no public
comment.' The statement went on, 'We request that our privacy be respected. The
school is cooperating fully with all applicable authorities.'"

"The accused pedophile scoutmaster of the Upper East Side's Boy
Scout Troop 666 will seek a no-jail deal today - and the young sodomy victim's
anguished family is furious. 'He is a wolf of the worst kind under that sheep's
clothing,' the victim's mother said of the since-fired scoutmaster - married
Upper East Sider Jerrold Schwartz, 42. 'Anything less than the maximum
sentence would be unfair to my son,' the mother - whose name is being kept
confidential - said in a Dec. 13 letter to the judge, who will consider a
possible plea deal today in Manhattan Supreme Court. Prosecutors say a total of
five credible victims have accused Schwartz - who also ran a Colorado-based
youth travel company - of turning Troop 666 into Boy Scout hell through a
pattern of winning kids' trust, tempting them with overnight ski and camping
trips - and then molesting them. 'I say 10 minutes in a room with me - that's a
fair sentence,' one of these alleged victims, a now 30-year-old Queens man,
angrily responded when informed of the negotiations yesterday. But Schwartz is
only charged with sodomizing one boy - a total of 36 times - because the statute
of limitations has run out on the other cases. That boy is now 20 years old.
He's in in-house rehab for cocaine addiction and alcoholism, his parents wrote
the judge. He bathes compulsively 'because he feels so dirty,' they said. He
also has nightly nightmares, and self-mutilates."

"The longtime cantor at one of the nation’s largest and most
prominent Reform synagogues was arrested in New York on Wednesday on charges
that he sexually abused a nephew, a prosecutor said. Howard Nevison, 61,
of Congregation Emanu-El, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was arrested at his
apartment, said Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. Police
in Lower Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, charged Nevison with sexually
assaulting the boy on three occasions between 1993 and 1997 while the boy was 3
to 7 years old. 'Like anyone else, we in law enforcement tend to believe that
religious figures are beyond reproach. You want to make very sure before you go
accusing one,' Castor said. Police have known about the allegations since about
1998 but did not pursue charges until the victim, who was undergoing therapy,
was ready to confront the uncle, Castor said. 'He had terrorized the child to
the point that, in the judgment of his parents, his therapists and our
investigators, he was too traumatized to go forward,' Castor said."

"The proper, prosperous residents of the Upper East Side of
Manhattan and of the Main Line Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion Township
stood united yesterday in sheer disbelief over the same sordid tale — a
synagogue cantor accused of molesting his prepubescent nephew. The lawyers,
investment bankers, politicians and other prominent members of Temple Emanu-El
in Manhattan struggled to square their image of the cantor, Howard Nevison,
the golden-voiced tenor who led them in prayer for 23 years, with the Lower
Merion police's description of him as a violent sexual abuser of a child. The
imposing temple at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, said to be the largest
synagogue in the world, is home to one of the nation's most prominent reform
congregations. It counts among its members the new mayor of New York, the
Manhattan district attorney and familiar names from the media and the arts."

"Joel's parents were as baffled as they were horrified. Almost a
year would pass before they'd come to understand the source of his demons, a
year in which their curly-haired boy was frequently suicidal and obviously
terrified. In therapy over the subsequent months, he slowly started revealing
the torments he'd endured at the hands of his own family. He'd been sexually
abused by his uncle Larry (his father's older brother, who confessed in
1999 and is currently in prison), and also by Larry's adult son
Stewart, who pleaded guilty and served a year before being released on
parole. Finally, the boy charged, he was sexually abused by his uncle Howie
(his father's oldest brother, fourteen years Henry's senior). Uncle Howie is
better known to New Yorkers as Cantor Howard Nevison, part of the
rabbinical hierarchy at Congregation Emanu-El, the city's most prominent Reform
Jewish synagogue, for 23 years.

In the early-morning hours of February 20, police arrested him in
his Upper West Side home. On April 17, a preliminary hearing will determine
whether there is enough evidence for the case to go to trial. He is contesting
the charges. 'Howard Nevison is innocent, and we are confident he will be
exonerated,' says his attorney, Ralph Jacobs. These accusations are very
different from the suddenly ubiquitous stories of priests molesting
parishioners. This is strictly a family affair ... .

But for Nevison, the blow had been coming for years; the cantor
first learned he was a suspect not long after Joel's parents initially
approached the police in 1998. Linda Fairstein, former longtime chief of the New
York district attorney's sex-crimes-prosecution unit, says she's "stunned" that
it took so long to file charges against the cantor. "I've never heard of that,"
she says. "It's quite extraordinary that people who already gained the trust of
a child for the prosecution of relatives couldn't then also elicit his consent
in prosecuting another one at the time."

Why the delay? Joel, according to the Pennsylvania
district attorney bringing the charges, was too afraid to testify against the
cantor, allegedly the most terrifying of the three men accused of molesting him.
In the affidavit of probable cause that resulted in Howard Nevison's
arrest, the boy describes him as 'a big man with a mean, powerful voice and
frightening glare,' who threatened to kill him if he spoke up ... Some parents
were outraged to learn that the temple leadership had known since 1998 about an
investigation of the Nevison family yet continued allowing the cantor to
meet with boys and girls preparing for their bar mitzvahs."

"Prosecutors say the Kensington man repeatedly raped and
sodomized two girls whom his wife was baby-sitting at their rowhouse. He
allegedly employed a plastic baseball bat on one occasion. But the ugliness of
the details is not all that makes the case stand out. Philadelphia police were
called in four years ago, when the attacks allegedly began. One of the girls,
then 8, described the assaults in graphic detail. But the sex-crimes unit closed
the case after a cursory investigation. Investigators did not interview the man,
Samuel Cohen, or inform child-welfare authorities of the allegations
against him, The Inquirer has learned. Cohen continued assaulting one of
the girls, then 7, for five more months, police now say. One of the assaults was
so brutal that the child was taken to a hospital with vaginal injuries, records
show."

"A 41-year-old man with a prior felony conviction for child
molestation was sentenced Monday to a minimum of 45 years in prison. In March,
Russell D. Cohen pleaded guilty to one count each of sexual assault with
a minor under 14, sexual assault with a minor under 16, and use of a minor in
producing pornography. Incidents involving about 10 victims were combined into
the three charges. Cohen was arrested in August and accused of forcing two boys
into sex acts. Authorities said Cohen met young boys by employing them to
distribute fliers throughout the Las Vegas Valley and then took them to his
home, where they were sexually abused. Shortly after news of Cohen's arrest was
circulated in the Las Vegas media, police received a videotape in the mail that
showed a man engaging in sex acts with several male juveniles. In October,
additional charges were filed against Cohen inconnection
with the videotape."

"Nine months after The Jewish Week reported on allegations
that Rabbi Baruch Lanner had abused teenagers in his charge for three
decades, a Monmouth County, N.J., grand jury indicted him Wednesday on six
criminal charges. The rabbi faces two counts each of aggravated criminal sexual
conduct, criminal sexual conduct and endangering the welfare of a child. The
crimes are second-, third- and fourth-degree offenses. A second-degree offense
carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison ... The first woman, now 19,
alleged that Rabbi Lanner sexually abused her almost daily in his office at the
yeshiva when she was a 14-year-old ninth-grader there in 1995 and 1996."

"A 62-year-old Haifa
man was charged yesterday with physically and mentally abusing his children and
wife for many years. He is also suspected of raping two of his daughters ... In
1984, the indictment says, he married a woman who had two daughters, aged 12 and
8. He is accused of raping his elder stepdaughter for the first time when she
was 17 and then throwing her out of the house naked. He continued raping her
until she turned 21, threatening to tell that she was sleeping with him if she
resisted. He stopped raping and abusing her only when she married, at the age of
23. He started raping his younger stepdaughter when she was 15, in addition to
beating her and screaming at her. He is alleged to have raped her several times
more between 1991 and 1993. When she joined the army, he humiliated her and
threw her out. She never returned to the family home. The man is also charged
with beating his wife in 2000 so badly that she required medical treatment. In
addition, he abused his wife for years with humiliating acts and insults at
every opportunity. The couple had three more daughters, born in 1986, 1987 and
1990. The man is also charged with abusing the young girls. He used to scream at
the older one and insult her until she started getting anxiety attacks. He
insisted on watching her dress against her will and stroke her behind against
her explicit wishes. He used to masturbate in front of the second daughter and
abuse her in similar ways, and is also suspected of brutally beating the
youngest child."

"Tel Aviv District
Court on Wednesday sentenced a 29-year-old Bnei Brak resident to nine years in
prison and two years' probation for sexually harassing and assaulting six
ultra-Orthodox youths between the ages of 14 and 16 over a period of years.
Avraham Asher was also accused of 'offering' one of the youths to two of his
friends, who also abused him. The two, Yossi Mozas and Yosef Garus,
both 29, from Bnei Brak, were given much lighter sentences ... The court heard
that Asher and his friends harassed the youths in bus shelters and at ritual
baths in Bnei Brak. Asher also assaulted the youths in showers and once visited
a yeshiva in Jerusalem, where one of the teenagers studied."

"With his Mickey
Mouse lapel pin replete with an American flag, prosecutor Ira Karmelin
cut a squeaky-clean image in the Palm Beach County Courthouse. But on Tuesday
the image was of the top assistant state attorney handcuffed outside the
courthouse and carted off to jail to face child sex charges. Karmelin, 38, is
accused of soliciting a woman, whom he believed was a 13-year-old girl, on the
Internet and performing lewd acts in front of her via a camera attached to his
computer. The prosecutor -- who also is a former sheriff's deputy -- is charged
with two third-degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison.
He is the first prosecutor under Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer
arrested on a felony charge. He was suspended without pay indefinitely and could
lose his law license ... Karmelin talked openly about his wish to become
a judge. Many of his colleagues, as well as defense attorneys, described
Karmelin as Krischer's favorite bulldog prosecutor. Just last week, Krischer
recommended Karmelin to be an assistant attorney general ... Orange
County Sheriff's Office Detective Tom Harrison, who came to West Palm Beach to
make the arrest, discovered Karmelin was a prosecutor when making
background checks on the screen name. 'When I learned that he was in fact an
assistant state attorney, after picking my chin off the floor and restarting my
heart... I knew he was not above anybody else,' Harrison said."

"Nineteen critics of
convicted sex offender and former Orthodox Union youth leader Rabbi Baruch
Lanner have signed a letter excoriating a respected rabbi, saying that he
withheld for more than a decade a 1989 rabbinical court ruling that found Lanner
guilty of abuse. The January 24 letter accuses Rabbi Mordechai Willig, a
highly regarded spiritual leader at Yeshiva University's rabbinical seminary, of
sharing the rabbinical court's findings against Lanner only with select
individuals who apparently 'did nothing to remove him from children.' It also
accuses Willig of pressuring one of Lanner's accusers, Elie
Hiller, to write a letter of apology. According to the letter, Willig,
who in 1989 led the New Jersey-based rabbinical court, or beit din, fed the
public perception that Lanner was innocent while Lanner continued
to have contact with children. Signed mostly by alleged Lanner victims
and their families, the letter comes after a meeting earlier this month in which
attendees say Willig stated, for perhaps the first time in so public a
forum, that Lanner was found guilty of some of the charges brought against him
in 1989. 'Rabbi Willig prioritized the reputation of a rabbinic colleague
a colleague who he knew was abusing kids ahead of the safety of children,' says
the letter ...

And in a separate
development, famed Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz has
been serving as a consultant to Lanner's defense team, according to
Dershowitz's brother Nathan. Nathan Dershowitz is one of
Lanner's full-time attorneys. Lanner is appealing his July conviction that he
sexually abused two teenage girls while he was their principal during the 1990s
at Hillel Yeshiva high school in Ocean Township, N.J. ...

A report prepared in
2000 by a special commission appointed to investigate the O.U.'s role in the
Lanner affair stated that Lanner sexually abused women and teenage girls and
physically abused boys and girls while he was a leader for decades at the O.U.'s
National Conference of Synagogue Youth. The report also cited the failure of
members of the O.U. and NCSY leadership to take effective action, allowing
Lanner's conduct to 'continue unchecked for many years.'"

"During his 30-year
career, Sidney I. Goldenberg taught math in the New York schools, served
as cantor at two synagogues on Long Island and became the rabbi of a Jewish
congregation in California. He was a respected teacher, a man of learning -- and
a child molester. Before he was convicted and sent to prison in 1997 for
sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl during bat mitzvah lessons, there had been
numerous complaints against him. But each time allegations arose, he moved to a
new community, leaving a trail of whispers and shattered lives. Prosecutors,
alleged victims and their families say Goldenberg was able to move from
job to job because of a wall of silence and shame around sexual abuse in the
Jewish community -- a wall that some believe is finally coming down, thanks to
the scandal over sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests. 'In the past it was
covered up, just like in the Catholic Church,' said Vicki Polin, an art
therapist in Baltimore who is forming an association of Jewish survivors of
childhood sexual abuse. 'Survivors' stories were discounted. They were told they
were lying. Their parents would go to the proper authorities within the Jewish
community and nothing was done' ...'I don't think pedophilia has a religion,'
said Na'ama Yehuda, a speech pathologist in New York who is co-founder,
with Polin, of the Awareness Center, an organization for Jewish survivors
of childhood trauma. The center's Web site (www.theawarenesscenter.org)
lists more than 30 Jewish officials who have been accused
of child sexual abuse. They include the late Shlomo Carlebach, a
renowned Hasidic rabbi; Baruch Lanner, an Orthodox rabbi who was
convicted last year of molesting two teenage girls; and Jerrold Levy, a
Reform rabbi imprisoned for sex crimes involving teenage boys ... 'In the
Catholic Church, the issue was the cover-up by the church hierarchy. Here, it's
the community, not the hierarchy. It's the whole community not wanting to admit
trouble in our midst,' said Yosef Blau, an Orthodox rabbi at New York's
Yeshiva University who counsels victims of sexual abuse."

"David Schwartz, a counselor for preschool boys at an Orthodox music and
arts camp, was sentenced to one year in residential treatment and five years’
probation for molesting a 4-year-old boy in his care at summer camp. A six-year
prison sentence was suspended. The Jan. 21 sentencing at the Airport Courthouse
came after Schwartz, the 36-year-old father of young children, accepted a
plea bargain in which he pleaded no contest to one felony count of committing
lewd acts with a child. (A plea of no contest in a criminal court is the
equivalent of guilty, but if victims decide to sue Schwartz, they cannot
use the criminal plea against him, according to the district attorney’s office.)
Schwartz will have to register as a sex offender for life, undergo at least two
years of sex offender therapy and is prohibited from being alone with minor
children, including his own, for the period of probation ... While all the boys
in the group told stories that indicated they had been molested and tormented,
only two were able to tell their stories coherently and consistently enough to
be considered admissible in court. Three parents spoke with The Jewish
Journal, telling of the long-lasting pain Schwartz has inflicted on
their families. Parents said their children spoke of being touched and hurt, and
watching Schwartz make 'white pee-pee.' Testimony and physical evidence
on at least one boy indicated that he was sodomized. Schwartz is alleged to have
brought a bird into class and cut off its head in front of the children, telling
them that if they told anyone about what happened, he would do the same to them
and their parents... When Schwartz was first arrested, many in the
Orthodox community — those who knew him and those who didn’t — asserted the
innocence of Schwartz, who was a counselor at Camp Ruach for two years
and taught middle school social studies at Yeshivat Yavneh in Hancock Park.
Several rabbis who knew him privately expressed disbelief that he could have
perpetrated such acts. At a hearing soon after his arrest, at which his bail was
reduced from $1 million to $300,000, Schwartz’s supporters heckled the
parents of the victims, accusing them of harming another Jew. But as details of
the boys’ stories came out, support waned."

"In the wake of the
arrest last week of Rabbi Israel Kestenbaum in a police Internet sex
sting operation, the director of a Los Angeles-based residential treatment
program for Jews with addictive and behavioral disorders believes a similar
program is needed here and has offered to assist. 'If we can share what we have
learned in our 16 years of existence, we would be glad to help,' said Harriet
Rossetto, director of Beit T’Shuvah, believed to be the country’s only
residential program for Jewish adults. Rossetto said three of the 110 Jews in
her program are rabbis there for sexual addiction. She is convinced that their
cases, as well as the arrests in recent years of rabbis accused of sex crimes,
are 'just the tip of the iceberg' ... The call for a treatment program for
rabbis comes after a string of much-publicized cases involving Jewish clergy
charged with sexual abuse of minors. They include Rabbi Baruch Lanner,
who last June was sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually abusing two
girls when he was principal of a New Jersey yeshiva in the 1990s. Rabbi
Lanner is free pending an appeal. Also, Cantor Howard Nevison of
Temple Emanu-el in Manhattan was charged last spring with sexually abusing his
young nephew. That trial has not begun. Rabbi Kestenbaum’s arrest is not
the first involving a rabbi accused of using the Internet to lure minors. In
December 2001, Rabbi Jerald Levy, 58, of Boca Raton, Fla., was sentenced
to six years in federal prison for downloading child pornography and luring
teenage boys to meet him for sex ... In the aftermath of two highly publicized
child abuse cases involving a rabbi teaching at a day school and a kosher
butcher, the Chicago Rabbinical Council a number of years ago established a
special bet din, or rabbinical court, to address allegations of sexual abuse of
children."

"A 34-year-old Eilat
resident was charged today in a Be'er Sheva court of sexually abusing an
underage teenager from Belarus over the past three years. According to the
indictment, Sergei Mayatski 'imported' the youth from Minsk, in Belarus,
after he met him in a public park during a visit to the city in September 1999.
Following a number of meetings with the youngster, who was 13 at the time,
Mayatski met his parents and convinced them to allow him to bring their son
to Israel. It is unclear whether the parents were aware of Mayatski's
intentions.

Two weeks later, the
teenager was sent to Israel, where a friend of Mayatski received him at the
airport as his own departure was delayed for two weeks because of a problem with
his entry visa into Israel. The friend took the teen to his home in Ashdod, and
according to the youth's testimony, also sexually abused him.

Upon his arrival to
Israel, in November 1999, Mayatski collected the youth from Ashdod, took
him to Eilat, and presented him as his son. However, during these years,
Mayatski systematically sodomized him. The sexual abuse was revealed nine
days ago following a complaint filed by Mayatski at the police that the youth
had disappeared. When the teenager was located, he was questioned and said that
he left home because he was tired of serving as Mayatski's sex slave."

[Sexual assault
statistics from the Jewish homeland: "The Light unto the World."]

"More than 2,300
girls and boys under the age of 12 were victims of sexual assault in the past
year, constituting 30 percent of the new cases reported to the sexual assault
aid centers. Almost 26 percent of the victims were 13 to 18 years old ... Forty
percent of the sexual assaults were carried out in the victim's home. 'The home,
of all places, which should be a safe, protective and supporting place, is where
many of the horrors take place,' states the report. About half of the victims
refrained from going to the police. The most prevalent attack - 26 percent of
the new calls - was rape, including gang rape. About 16 percent of the callers
complained about incest by fathers (6.5 percent), brothers (2.6 percent) or
other relatives. Some 14 percent complained of indecent acts. About 30 percent
of the 110 gang rape victims who called the Tel Aviv aid center were men. Out of
519 calls reporting non-gang rape to this center, 25 percent were men. Some 20
percent of the victims of indecent acts reported in Tel Aviv were men. 'The
sexual assault of boys, male youths and men is a hushed-up crime, which is
almost completely absent from discourse in Israeli society,' the report states.
'It does not occur to the victims that anyone would listen to their ordeal.' The
centers operate a hotline and support groups, and accompany the victims during
the criminal procedures ... According to the report, the largest group of
victims - constituting 19 percent - were attacked by family relatives, 4.2
percent were attacked by a spouse, and 14 percent by a friend or acquaintance.
Only 12 percent of the assaults were perpetrated by a complete stranger."